Jordan Bar Am and Isaac Grody-Patinkin would admit it: This isn't their fathers' student activist movement.

They negotiate with businesses and collaborate with campus officials instead of picketing their offices. They argue points in articulate e-mail messages and phone conversations rather than staging raucous antiestablishment protests. While their predecessors in the 1960s and '70s urged people to boycott California grapes to show solidarity with migrant farm workers, Bar Am and Grody-Patinkin urge consumers to go out and shop -- albeit selectively.

Bar Am, a Harvard senior, and Grody-Patinkin, a junior at New York University, are Northeast regional leaders in a national organization called United Students for Fair Trade. Their mission: to tip the balance of power in international trade in favor of small-scale coffee farmers impoverished by four years of depressed worldwide coffee prices. While there's concern among some of the group's supporters that students risk becoming cheerleaders for corporations not fully invested in fair trade, no one denies that it is swiftly chalking up victories. Since its founding by a handful of students last year, USFT has grown to include affiliates on more than 100 US campuses, including Harvard, Boston College, the University of Massachusetts Boston, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Mount Holyoke College.

USFT will mark its first anniversary this month at a National Convergence in Santa Cruz, Calif., that is expected to draw more than 100 students, including 21 from Northeast colleges and universities. The agenda will likely include ideas for increasing the volume of fair trade coffee sold in the United States and exploring ways to collaborate with small fair-trade roasters, not just large campus food-service suppliers that offer fair-trade products as a sideline, says Grody-Patinkin, who worked with Bar Am to organize a USFT booth at last April's Specialty Coffee Association of America conference in Boston.

Shayna Harris, Oxfam America's fair-trade coffee organizer who worked on BU's fair-trade campaign before graduating in June, says the national meeting will lay the groundwork for regional student conferences, including one in Boston this spring.

As the fair-trade movement expands beyond coffee to include tea, cocoa, and (as of last month) fresh fruit, coffee remains its emblem, and students acknowledge that the craze for specialty coffee has made it easier to generate interest in the problems of coffee farmers. Since hitting a low of 42 cents a pound in 2001, the commodity market price for coffee has crept back to about 70 cents.

But proponents of fair trade -- a system that pays farmers at least $1.26 per pound, or $1.41 for organic coffee -- say that still falls short of the 80 cents a pound it costs small-scale farmers to produce gourmet beans. According to Oxfam, a "coffee crisis" affects 25 million coffee-growing families in more than 50 countries, from Mexico to Ethiopia. In Latin America, where non-fair-trade farmers end up with an average of 20 cents per pound after paying brokers known as "coyotes," Oxfam says the crisis compels growers to abandon their farms and contributes to poverty and malnutrition in coffee-growing communities.

By guaranteeing price floors, eliminating middle men, and offering growers financing, fair-trade arrangements are credited with helping farming communities afford schools and health clinics, as well as agricultural improvements that lead to better-quality beans for consumers.

"Very few people knew what it was three years ago. The increasing awareness has just been tremendous," says Bar Am, who led a campaign that resulted this school year in Harvard's dining halls converting to 100 percent fair-trade coffee. "It's entered sort of the lexicon for a lot of students. People are going to graduate and move, and hopefully this will take off beyond college towns."

Coffee is brewing social and economic change on US campuses, fair-trade specialists say, and the Boston area is playing a key role, thanks to the region's wealth of colleges and universities and the proximity of two crucial players. Equal Exchange -- the country's first and largest 100 percent fair-trade coffee company -- is in Canton and employs student interns in its Fair Trade Summer program. Boston's Oxfam advises USFT and has a summer fair-trade program, too.

According to Trans Fair USA, the agency that certifies fair-trade coffee producers, 15 colleges and universities -- including Harvard and Smith College -- brew only certified fair-trade coffee in their dining halls. Officials of Sodexho USA, a food services provider, and the National Association of College and University Food Services report that many more are part of a trend toward offering at least some fair-trade coffee on campus in response to student demand. Trans Fair spokeswoman Haven Bourque says 200 colleges and universities serve fair-trade coffee.

At Boston College, senior Tim Wientzen helped get fair-trade coffee into all of the campus dining halls in September 2002. In November, UMass-Boston converted its Green Mountain Coffee kiosk to 95 percent fair trade and added fair-trade options at its Starbucks kiosk, thanks to the efforts of senior Asghar Syed and Mike Forcier, Sodexho general manager at the university. BU serves fair-trade coffee in its Union Court coffee shop every day and at its Starbucks store on Fridays, says dining services director Joshua Hubbard. At Emerson College, fair trade is a choice in all cafeterias, says Jesse Kirkpatrick, a recent graduate and campus fair-trade organizer.

While switching to fair trade puts money in farmers' pockets, colleges sometimes shoulder extra costs. At UMass-Boston, Sodexho absorbed the 3-5 cents that fair-trade coffee adds to each cup, Forcier says. At Harvard, the switch to fair trade cost the university $7,000, says spokeswoman Alex McNitt. Yale University bit the bullet for $14,000 when it opted to offer only Equal Exchange coffee this year, says manager Chuck Bennett. At Tufts, the fair-trade coffee in one retail shop costs 15 percent more than the same company's conventional blend.

Besides brokering deals with university officials and coffee companies, USFT members engage regularly in what college students traditionally do best: spreading the word. Dunkin' Donuts spokeswoman Michelle King says the Randolph-based company hopes to work with USFT members this spring to conduct a fair-trade education campaign. Bar Am says students have corresponded with the retailer through Trans Fair. One possibility, he says, would involve Dunkin' Donuts giving out free lattes and cappuccinos at campus events while students talk up fair trade. Dunkin' Donuts announced in April that it is using fair-trade beans in its new espresso beverages, which account for 4 percent to 5 percent of shop sales.

"One of the beauties about fair trade is this is a way students and companies can work together in a really positive way," Bar Am says. "As a consumer, I have a relationship with the people who produce the things I consume, and I want that relationship to be an ethical one. Fair trade is an idea that resonates with everybody. It's just a matter of being exposed to it."